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It’s the end of another great year in education-reform punditry. What was on the mind of Fordham experts and guest bloggers this year? Common Core for sure, from teaching literacy to the coming assessments; but also the fate of unions, no-excuses charters, career and technical education, differentiated instruction, and more.

THIS MUST BE WHY CHECKER WEARS SPURS AROUND THE OFFICESpeaking before an audience in Cleveland, CREDO’s director, Macke Raymond, depicted Ohio’s situation as “grim,” though she conceded that the city’s charter schools “are creating a positive result.” In the Plain Dealer’s synopsis of the talk, they recalled a NACSA characterization of the state as “the Wild, Wild West” of charter sectors.

FALL OF BYZANTIUMThe Daily Callerquotes Ohio State Auditor David Yost in its review of official reactions to both reports. In a statement, Yost described the state’s charter regulations as “byzantine” (great SAT word, everyone), asserting that they have given rise to “lax oversight by boards, conflicts of interest, improper spending and even criminal conduct by some rogue schools and operators.”

THE GOOD KIND OF AUDITYost went on to laud the recommendations set forth in the Bellwether study, raising the hope that some could be enacted in the future under recently re-elected Governor John Kasich: “This report does a good job of pointing out where Ohio’s governance of community schools doesn’t work. We can do a lot of good...

But our report was written in response to conditions in Ohio. Several provisions in the Buckeye State’s law are unusual, and after more than fifteen years of charter experience, Ohio can now see the long-term consequences of many of its policy decisions.

For instance, the legislature tasked the Ohio Department of Education with crafting an authorizer-ranking system that will help the state restrict low-quality authorizers’ ability to oversee charters. We believe this accountability boost (importantly, without any new burdens on schools) is necessary in Ohio because the state has so many authorizers, some of which oversee large numbers of persistently low-performing schools. In states with fewer authorizers, stronger authorizing practices, and/or stronger charter school performance, this novel policy is far less critical.

Similarly, in 2006, Ohio passed legislation to automatically close persistently failing charter schools. We call for strengthening that law, which currently has loopholes for schools serving specific student populations. If all Ohio charter schools were successful, or if all Ohio authorizers held their schools accountable, an automatic-closure law would be unnecessary....

RANK CONFUSIONThe Education Department unveiled its new college ranking system designed to keep higher education institutions accountable for performance on “key indicators.” The administration will look at factors such as expansion of college access to disadvantaged groups, net price and available scholarships, and graduation rates. University presidents and chancellors, however, say the rating system does a poor job of measuring metrics that truly matter, such as relationships with professors and campus culture.

EASY GRADERSGovernor Cuomo continues to anger New York teachers unions with his reform agenda. Cuomo expressed his desire to expand charters and alter teacher dismissal procedures in a letter to John King, New York’s outgoing education commissioner. The governor specifically took issue with the fact that recent teacher assessments classified only 1 percent of the state’s teachers as ineffective.

TIP #1: DON’T DISCLOSE THE DETAILS OF ANY UNSOLVED CRIMESJust in time for all those last-minute revisions at the December 31 deadline, the Answer Sheet blog has a useful guide to aceing your college application essay. Among their expert pointers: Stick to a clear message, don’t get too cheeky, and abide by word limits. Notably, they offer no guidance on whether to compose your heartfelt work in Comic Sans.

WEEKEND LONG READWhile savoring your Sunday cantaloupe, take some time to enjoy the latest entry of “A Promise to Renew,” the Hechinger Report’s epic, award-winning series on Newark’s Quitman Street Renew School. In turnaround since 2012,...

Just in time for Christmas, my Fordham colleague Mike Petrilli has left a present under the tree for inquisitive children and busy parents who don’t think the sky will fall if the kids get a little screen time now and again (it won’t).

Over the course of a year’s blog posts, and with the help of several able Fordham interns, Mike curated some of the best streaming web videos on Netflix, Amazon, and elsewhere. He then aligned them with the Core Knowledge Sequence, a robust list of subjects from pre-K to eighth grade that undergirds the curriculum at some of the nation’s most successful schools. These have now been repackaged into a neat little website he’s calling “Netflix Academy.” Homeschoolers for whom Core Knowledge is a subject of near-religious devotion will also be grateful for this resource.

You’ll find videos on science, literature, and U.S. and world history. Click on “Science,” for example, and you’ll see a drop-down menu organized by knowledge domains (aquatic life, mammals, insects, outer space, etc.). Within each domain are direct links to streaming videos from Netflix, National Geographic, PBS, YouTube, and others sources. You’ll also find movie versions of classic children’s book and lots more. It’s entertainment with high caloric content.

“As E.D. Hirsch Jr. has argued for a quarter-century, the early elementary years are the ideal time to introduce children to the wonders of history (natural and otherwise), geography, literature, art, music, and more,” Mike writes.

EGGHEADS IN ONE BASKETFor high schoolers with their eyes set on the Ivy League, piling on extracurriculars, volunteer hours, and APs may seem like a necessary evil. These days, the competition to get through the eye of the admissions needle is nearly insurmountable, and many of the brightest, most overscheduled kids are being waitlisted. A recent article has some advice for these young hopefuls: Instead of spending all your time juggling, put your energy into one master project. In other words, now would be a good time to unearth those plans to start a nonprofit sending iPads to Sudan.

NOW IF YOU'LL EXCUSE ME, I NEED TO GO SEE A MAN ABOUT A CAMPAIGN JETIn a statement earlier this week, Scott Walker walked back some of his strong opposition to the Common Core. The Wisconsin governor went from supporting a repeal-and-replace agenda to allowing schools that might wish to use standards to continue doing so. Furthermore, in response to Jeb Bush’s presidential non-announcement, Walker claimed that he would not let the former Florida governor’s decision affect his own and that he would like to “do more with education reform, entitlement reform, and tax reform,” while serving the people of Wisconsin.

ORDER WITHOUT CASUALTIESNPR has a terrific, granular look at one school’s application of what is being called “restorative justice.” The approach seeks to minimize the use of suspensions and expulsions as a punishment for disruptive behavior—punishments that have been...

Back in 2006, NACSA, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute issued Turning the Corner to Quality, a tough report on Ohio’s charter sector whose message was summed up in its first major recommendation: “Clean House.” There were too many failing charters, oversight had gone from bad to worse after the legislature removed chartering authority from the state education department, and the state’s charter cap was effectively shutting out strong operators.

In the intervening eight years, a lot of good things have happened, including successful charter ventures like Cleveland’s Breakthrough Schools; a default-closure law that has eliminated twenty-four low-performing charters; and most recently, a concerted effort by the state agency’s Quality School Choice office, led by former NACSA staffer David Hansen, to bring accountability to the state’s multitudinous authorizers.

Yet the muck persists. Last week, CREDO at Stanford reported that on the whole, students in Ohio’s charters are getting fourteen fewer days of learning in reading and thirty-six fewer days in math than their counterparts in district-run schools. There are some bright spots. Cleveland charters outperform the district; performance is better in charters for black students and those in poverty; middle schools do comparatively well; and there seems to be a trend toward improvement among urban charters. But overall performance hasn’t improved since CREDO’s 2009 Ohio study, and is particularly weighed down by woefully deficient results...

Editor's note: This post is the fifth entry of a multi-part series of interviews featuring Fordham's own Andy Smarick and Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at Holy Cross. It originally appeared in a slightly different form at Education Week's K-12 Schools: Beyond the Rhetoric blog. Earlier entries can be found here, here, here, and here.

Smarick: For several decades some education advocates (including teachers’ unions), after failing to win in legislatures, have successfully used state courts to achieve one of their top priorities: increasing K–12 funding. In a historical twist, some in the reform community, unable to win in legislatures, are now using state courts to overturn tenure rules.

Regardless of your views on any specific policy matter, what do you think of the general strategy of using courts instead of the elected branches to achieve K–12 policy goals? More specifically, what do you think of the Vergara decision, which overturned California's laws on seniority and tenure?

Schneider: It's a good question. Because this is an issue around which there's a lot of philosophical yoga. Liberals and conservatives alike bend themselves into all kinds of positions—advocating judicial restraint and judicial activism—depending on whether they like the outcome of a case.

Frankly, I see no problem with using the courts if the elected branches fail to act. The desegregation cases of the 1950s and 1960s are a great example of this. States and school districts were in violation of the law, and the courts—the Supreme Court as well as lower courts—stepped in to...

This fall, the editorial boards of two of Ohio’s most widely read newspapers issued stinging missives urging legislators to make sweeping changes to the state’s charter school law. In September, the Plain Dealer opined that lawmakers should “work together on a bill to improve charter schools.” One month later, in light of revelations about a questionable charter-facilities deal, the Columbus Dispatch argued that charter reform “should address questionable lease deals along with other loopholes, conflicts and oversights in Ohio’s charter-school system.”

They’re absolutely right: 120,000 Buckeye charter students deserve to attend a school governed by a great charter law—a law that puts the interests of children first. But at the present time, Ohio’s charter law too often fails to protect these students’ best interests; instead, in too many ways, it protects powerful vested interests, smothers schools with red tape, starves even the best schools, and tolerates academic mediocrity.

Predictably, overall charter school performance in Ohio has been lackluster. In the two most extensive evaluations of Ohio charter performance in 2009 and 2014, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that Ohio charter school students, on average, make less academic progress than their district counterparts. The 2014 results, released last week, estimated that charter students received an equivalent of fourteen fewer days of learning in reading and forty-three fewer days of learning in math.

…for the Republican Party. Election Day 2014 was a rout, with the GOP winning full control of Congress and its largest House majority since World War II. Republican governors were re-elected in Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Kansas, and Maine. Democrat Pat Quinn was booted out of office in President Obama’s home state of Illinois. Republican now control two-thirds of state legislatures too. The GOP groundswell “will be good for education reform, especially reforms of the school-choice variety,” predicted Fordham’s Mike Petrilli.

It was the worst of times…

...for teachers’ unions. “It’s open season on teacher employment protection laws in U.S. state courts,” noted Fordham’s Brandon Wright on the heels of June’s Vergara v. California verdict holding California’s tenure laws unconstitutional. And the hits just kept on coming. In October, the commission that runs the financially troubled Philadelphia public school system unilaterally canceled the union’s contract and ruled teachers must contribute to their health insurance to free up money for classrooms. (A good decision to avoid the big squeeze.) Election Day made the annus horribilis complete. The $60 million the AFT and NEA spent on campaigns merely advertised their impotence. The unions took out their frustrations in the waning days of 2014 on a TIME magazine cover story on tenure. “It’s a lot easier to gin up phony outrage over magazine covers than reckon with the question of...

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Mike Petrilli is one of the nation's foremost education analysts. As president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, he oversees the organization's research projects and publications and contributes to the Flypaper blog and weekly Education Gadfly newsletter.